


Breaking the Yearlings

by blood bag boogie (evil_bunny_king), evil_bunny_king



Series: Pine, Cedar [2]
Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Omens and luck and loss and love, always hope, but also Hope
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:02:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28947123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/blood%20bag%20boogie, https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil_bunny_king
Summary: Adam du Mortain has lived too many lives. He'd live many more, to see her again.-“Did you see it?” Adam’s voice is a rasp. He looks at the empty space, where the creature had been.Nate hesitates a moment, before: “I did. But only upon exit.” Another pause. “What was it?”Fate.Adam closes his eyes.“I do not know.”
Relationships: Female Detective/Adam du Mortain
Series: Pine, Cedar [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2110209
Comments: 25
Kudos: 27





	1. Beginnings: part 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mistressfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mistressfaith/gifts).



> Gift for Shawnee :)

He is eight and running through his father's fields, soft-limbed and clumsy, dragging his hands over the ears of barley. The surrounding hills squat on the horizon, smudges against the sunset sky, fat and indignant. The village lies below, a newborn colt amongst the straw of thin branched pine and he turns away from it; turns away from the house behind him, ablaze with light, his new sister's cries spilling out into the evening.

Tonight, he is an exile from his own home.

His sister has screamed almost since the moment he met her. He’s never seen a babe before, but he’s certain they don’t cry _this much_ \- and so changeling, he’s decided he’ll call her (quietly, and out of earshot); faechild, for she must be one, wild as she is.

Green-eyed like a cat, like him, like his mother. As loud as a fox fight - he doesn't understand how something so small could make so much _noise._

And so he has escaped for now; slipped out of the house while his mother bent over the babe (Cecelia, a niggling thought reminds him. He ignores that too). 

His palms itch and so he pulls them to his chest, squeezing them in his cotton jacket. Over the rippling barley he can see the treeline and the last of the birds, darting overhead. And above it again, the inverse cat eye of the moon, slit open, indolent.

It’s finally quieter, out here. It’s quieter still as he follows the line of trees towards the barefaced ridge, scrambling over stones and old tree trunks slippery with moss and the descending chill.

There’s an old grotto there. A thief’s bolt hole, his father had warned him - and maybe there would be one there again, but Adam has his knife and he is quick, and he is not afraid.

The jut of raw stone is still when he reaches it, the trees curving away from the sudden rise of rock.

Adam hides behind a pine with his knife in his hands all the same, watching for movement, pressing his hands into the trunk and breathing in the thick, chill scent of the pine.

He waits until the colours of the sky have shifted from amber to violet, blue, before he ventures into the grotto.

It’s shallow, just a shadow between the rocks, half-obscured by the slipped shelf of stone that formed one of its sides. And it’s dark, dark enough that he can hardly see as he crawls into it, but he crawls all the same, because he’d decided he would do so ( _your pride, dear son, will be your undoing,_ his mother had chastised him, more than once).

It’s empty, like he thought it would be. Just cold stone and the old markings on the walls, scratched names, his own among them.

He runs his fingers over them, squinting in the dim light until a breath of cold slinks into the cave, drawing a shiver up his spine and he turns on his knees to shuffle out again.

He freezes.

There’s a silhouette in the entrance, two shining eyes peering at him in the dark.

A wildcat, he thinks; it’s not large enough to be a wolf. Its tread is heavy as it takes a single step onto the rock, the bulk of its shoulders almost blotting out the light, and he raises his small knife between them, tries to make himself larger, his heart pounding in his breast. 

It watches him, unafraid, gilded silver by the moonlight.

After a long moment, he takes a steadying breath (ignoring how it shakes) and waves his knife at it, hissing through his teeth in an attempt to scare it.

The cat remains as it is, motionless. Almost as if it were _waiting_.

That shiver creeps over him again, raising the downy hair on his arms, prickling at the nape of his neck.

It blinks once, slowly. He can only see the glitter of its eyes, the tuft of its ears as it flicks them. And then, just as slowly, it glances back- alert, listening- and is gone - a rush of air, the flick of a golden-silver tail. Adam is left panting in the small space, his grip on the knife shaking, slippery, until it almost falls from his fingers.

He hears voices - his father’s voice, calling for him, out amongst the barley.

His rescue.

He scrambles out - so quickly he scuffs his knees and draws blood - and then, when he’s sure the beast is gone, he runs like the child he is along the forest and into his father’s arms, burying his head in his stomach. He feels his father shake with laughter before his hands fall to his head, ruffling admonishingly through his hair.

“A mirage,” his father told him, when the story was out, back in the warmth of the house (his little sister was asleep at last, curled with his mother in the large bed). His father lightly chuffed his chin and smiled at how Adam wrinkled his nose in displeasure. “Or just a stray beast. You’re lucky it didn’t gobble you up. And now,” he continued, over Adam’s disagreement, “to bed.”

Still grumbling, he does what he’s told, slipping into the big bed on the other side of his mother, only wincing _a little_ when the blanket rubbed against his scraped knees.

When he sleeps his dreams are filled with silver moons and wind stripped pines and the shadows that prowl between them, watching and waiting.

The next day they’re forgotten, lost in the wash of chores and his duty (page to his father that he is, and soon to be squire, as soon as he is strong enough to lift his own sword).

The day after that, his life changes.

His father has been called to arms by the Norman duke for the promise of fife and title. Adam accompanies him and his mother lays kisses and tears upon his brow before they go, his little sister wrapping her hand tightly around his little finger, babbling nonsense before he takes his leave of her as well and they descend the hill, his father’s men and horses and the two of them, trampling a path around the barley.

They travel the week’s journey to _Saint-Valery-sur-Somme,_ Adam on his father’s war horse when his feet ache too much from the walking. And then, after the long months of preparation, they head to England, and to war.


	2. Beginnings: part 2

It’s a life and a world apart that he sees his wildcat once more.

It’s a warm evening in early summer; what would be considered spring back in Normandy, but it’s been a dozen years since he’d last set eyes on his father’s land there and he is bold, and he is strong; well used to the english weather.

He is a far cry from the boy he once was. A knight: committed to liege and sword, the one his father had given him after his knighthood. He is a _man_ \- and he leans out on that precipice of love, of fate, lost in honey-warm eyes and fire-bright auburn hair, like silk between his fingers.

He burns under the touch of her teasing hands, the warmth of her mouth. They hold each other, drunk on love and the vows they'd exchanged, the promise he'd tied around their wrists in the eyes of a god he'd forfeit for the taste of her, and like this he feels - whole. He feels home, for the first time since he’d stumbled, jelly-legged, onto this country's pebbled shores. Conqueror, stranger.

_Betrothed. Beloved._

He practises his new tongue against the seam of her lips, in the warm circle of her arms. _I love you_ , (he holds the sounds in his mouth and she rears up to steal them from him, licking them free with her sweet, devastating kisses). _I want you-_ (on a gasp, as he presses her back into their makeshift bed, hand smoothing up her thigh) _I need you, I love-_

Later, as they lay on their shared bedroll in the shelter of his father's stables, he sees the cat-eye of the moon again, halved by the stable window. He feels the air stir like a breath, a whisper of awareness that steps down his arms, across their bare bodies, wrapped as they are in the blankets he'd smuggled here during the day. 

His wild cat comes, a shiver of silver by the stall door, round eyes echoing the moon.

His beloved - even in memory he won't evoke her name, evoke the full measure of what he'd lost - his beloved does not stir. Neither do the horses in the stalls adjacent; the world turns, unaffected, ignorant.

They look at each other, he and his beast, and the night stills.

He thinks he knows what it is, now. It’s an omen - or his fate, perhaps, visiting upon him on the precipice of great change. His love of her, he thinks, his heart beating anew, fierce with that love and determination and hope, arrogant, trusting hope: how they'd forge a new life together, against blood, against duty. A new name. A new start.

The great cat blinks once, slowly. It hasn’t changed since that night he first saw it, all those years ago; he recognises the scar wrapped around its tufted ear, notched in the light.

Adam opens his mouth to speak- and hesitates, for only - what is it he could say? What would he ask?

The moment breaks before he gets the chance to voice it.

The beast shifts, its head whipping back to look behind it. Its great shoulders shift, ignoring Adam’s hissed plea to wait- and then it’s gone, the splintered wood beneath its claws the only sign of its passing.

There is the clatter of approaching footsteps. The bob of lamplight - the nightwatchman's torch, he realises, making their rounds- and quickly, frantically, he reaches for the blankets-

Adam hovers over his lover in the dark, breath held as he listens to the guard drift to the stable entrance, pause, and then, idly, move on. The breath leaves him in a gust, the curl of a laugh, and then he pulls the woman in his arms close, smiling at her sleepy murmurs - nonsense, more voice than words. He presses a kiss to her brow.

"I love you," he whispers in her tongue, "I love you, _ma tigresse_ ," and his heart beats hope into his breast, warm and overfull.

They will have to wake soon, dredge themselves from their makeshift marital bed, but for now - oh for now he _hopes_ , awaiting the dawn, the life to come.

\--

His new life comes.

He loses everything.


	3. Alaska; Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Is it fate?" Adam's voice is quiet, hardening. He doesn’t believe in it. "Does such a thing exist?"
> 
> Another curl of amusement. _No. It doesn't._

Decades, centuries pass, and with time, the grief and vivid reality of his devastated life - if not settles - blurs. Adam du Mortain, son of Normandy, of England, is gone. Adam remains, not quite human and not quite anything else, either, out of step with the pace of the world and with time.

There are choices made that cannot be undone and he will carry them, for as long as he yet walks this earth. He holds himself apart. Alone.

He finds himself forging a new life, regardless.

It starts with the alliance: an almost mercenary agreement of protection. This becomes an armed escort to a council of joint supernatural species, that becomes negotiation, that becomes - community. Change. A different kind of hope, a pulse beating through the families assembled and it's _purpose_ that he finds here, utility, a cause to dedicate his unravelling years.

Of his omen, there is little sign. There are glimpses, throughout the millennia, of _her_ \- a flicker of red and gold in the corner of his eye; the phantom scent of pine, sun-drenched grass. There are memories shadowing him in the villages and cities he stalks, despite the leagues he’s placed between himself and his old home, but the glimpses are rarely real - and it’s never her.

Of his beast - he catches the silhouette, occasionally, at the end of a dark alley. Familiar eyes peering from apartment windows - but cats are common enough wherever he travels, and he’d grown up with a crop of his own, once; the mousers in his father’s barn, not quite tame but not wild, either (he’d tempt them out with slivers of fish and drams of milk from the kitchens; play with their kittens between the sacks of barley). It’s coincidence. It had been a dream. The superstitions of a boy drunk on his nursemaid’s stories, and then on first love.

(One hot evening in Tenerife he sees the cat-eye of the moon between wind-torn clouds; hears the yowl of cats against the gathering humidity and static and he _knows_ like he’d known before, of the oncoming of some great change-

And the storm comes, driving wrecks upon the rocks and bodies to the beaches. He pulls the survivor from the waves, Nathaniel, Nate, shuddering back to life in his hands, and there’s something of the moon in those wild, brown eyes - familiarity in the grief and the cracked, desperate sobs. His mirror, reflecting back up at him.)

For almost a millennia there is the grief, whole, crippling.

But there is also-

\--

He finally sees the beast in the flesh after the millennium.

He is with his unit (his family) hunting a rumor across the Alaskan tundra. Morgan and Farah interrogate the local residents in a miserable town hunched at the base of a lake, while Adam and Nate take the company land rover further afield.

There’s a peace to the frozen landscape, the brittle brightness of the moon, arced low over the horizon. Above the rumble of the motor Nate hums softly to himself, a tune he recognises from a performance they have enjoyed many times over the years, and after a moment Adam joins him.

He doesn’t turn to look but he can feel the force of Nate’s smile, as warm as any sun.

His ears burn but he keeps his gaze focused on the road, on the changing landscape, his grip secure in his gloves on the steering wheel. If he smiles too, well, there is only the two of them to see it.

It’s not long after that he spots it.

A shadow, against a purgatory of snow. A blur of cream, shining eyes against the moonlit vista, and there’s that prickle of awareness - magic, he realises now - tracing up his spine again, chilled, familiar.

He almost crashes the car.

Gripping the steering wheel with knuckle-white hands, he pulls to a hard stop on the edge of the road, the car sliding from the momentum. He turns off the motor. For a moment there’s just the tick of the engine and the _memory_ \- the force of a pain he’d half-forgotten and then Nate is there, Nate’s hand is on his shoulder, holding him upright as he gasps a breath (when had he stopped?).

"Adam-" He can hardly hear him through the thunder in his ears - his heart, he realises dimly, it's his heart. "Adam, what-"

A flicker of movement, the beast turning to lope away and Adam jerks, a reflex action, unclicking his belt and reaching blindly for the door handle.

"I must-"

Nate catches his gaze, his eyes almost black in the fading light, and for a wild moment Adam wonders if he, too, is haunted by a sky - but that is foolish- he knows, he knows the nightmares that still plague him.

"Do not follow," he manages, voice rasped, the _please_ unspoken. And then he opens the door and he plunges into the tundra, chasing his ghost.

The air is crisp and bitterly cold, catching in his chest as he runs. His snow boots sink heavily into the snow as he follows it into the wilderness and it leads him to a dip between two ridges lined with gnarled, short trunked shrubs, the hoar frost crunching underfoot.

And then it stops, short tail twitching.

He halts as well.

"What are you." His voice is unlike himself. He does not recognise it, recognise the pattern of his heartbeat, the emotions that have besieged him, robbing him of his calm and his breath.

But he is himself enough to recognise what he could not, all those years ago and still mortal, human.

He can smell the poppy-sweet scent of the echolian portals. He can sense the magic, humming against his skin like trailing fingertips - and this creature- kin to his omen or perhaps even his omen itself, is supernatural.

They stand, two statues in a frozen tableau, the illusion broken only by the wisps of their breath.

"What do you know of me?"

The beast looks at him, the liquid dark of its eyes stark against the glittering landscape. It flicks its ear and he recognises with a lurching jolt the scar that wraps along the shell of its ear, the notch beneath the tuft of black, like charcoal on old parchment.

It's the same beast as before. A timewalker, then - or perhaps just as long lived as he is. Their meeting is a _choice_ , and he takes a lurched step forward, staggered, reflexive. The beast tenses, its short tail switching. With difficulty he holds himself still again.

"Why have you followed me?" he tries, a foreign note in his voice. A thread of desperation, he realises. And more questions are welling, trying to force themselves from his tongue: _what will you take from me this time? Who else am I to lose-?_

His thoughts flick to his family - to Nate by the car, to Morgan and Farah in the valley, and that sickening lurch in his stomach almost overcomes him, doubling him over and sending him to his knees in the snow.

He remains there, regathering his breath, snow melting into his coat, and after a pause he hears deliberate steps pressing closer over the snow.

It speaks. For the first time it speaks.

 _I am neither one thing or another_ . It is a strange voice, a burr like a cat's purr and quite possibly not spoken aloud but he understands it all the same, clear over the thudding of his heart. _And I do not follow you. I have found you, from time to time. Moment by moment._

He looks up and it's before him now, barely a foot away.

"Why?" The word is hushed, cracked.

 _Because yours is a life of great change._ It pauses. _It interests me._

His breath leaves him on a laugh. "Is that it?"

_Should it be anything else?_

It considers him. Its eyes are amber-dark, silvered by the moonlight.

He works his throat, gathering his scattered thoughts, his pulse running its uneven rhythm in his ears. "Arguably, you've haunted me."

Amusement curls through its tone, like honey in warm wine. _Arguably. That is your own interpretation. Not my own._

"Why are you here now?"

Its blink is slow, languid. He knows what it will say, but he waits for it regardless.

 _You are on the brink of great change. I can smell it on you. See it. Like gossamer thread._ It tilts its head, looking at him, looking through him. _It is one of the greatest that I've seen on you._

"Loss? Will it be-" he can't finish the sentence and it hangs between them, heavy, laden.

It blinks again. _I cannot tell._

His jaw tightens, ticks, and it seems to hesitate, before: _it does not belong just to you. You've shared this fate with another, since before your last great change._

"Is it fate?" His voice is quiet, hardening. He doesn’t believe in it. Even haunted by omens, he’s known nothing that can bind, determine, the path a life will take. "Does such a thing exist?"

Another curl of amusement. _No. It doesn't._

The cold has sunk into his knees now. The snow blown from the ridges is settling over him, on his coat, melting on his cheeks, and yet he stays as he is, frozen in place.

He finds his words.

“Why do this at all?”

Silence.

He presses again, a thread of anger, frustration in his voice now: “all you've given are riddles, and half-answers. What is it that you want? What do you gain?”

The wind is changing, drawing a fog that haloes the crescent moon, hazing it from sight and the beast's shoulders shift, fur shivering, rippling.

 _We do as we must,_ is all it says, simply. _As must all._ _We are creatures of chance._ Another slow blink, a purred curl of amusement. _Or fate. Whichever you like._

Adam's eyes narrow. "We-?"

 _I have said enough._ It stirs into motion once more before he can finish the question, head dipping to nod at a point behind him. _Your friend approaches. And no-_ it says, amused again, before Adam can ask, _he is not the one you are fated with._

It crouches, and then springs to the right, its long legs bunching and unbunching, paws outstretched. Except instead of landing on snow, it seems to press into something else, into clear air, suddenly viscous and rippling like the surface of a mirror.

A final flick of its back paws, kicking up snow, and then it is gone, the space where it had been empty and smooth once more.

The sound of approaching footsteps, deliberate, careful.

"Adam."

Nate comes up beside him, pressing his hand to his shoulder. There is frost on his eyelashes, a flush risen high on his cheeks - his teeth are chattering but still he crouches in the snow beside him, the familiar presence and weight of him comforting, grounding.

“Did you see it?” Adam’s voice is a rasp. He looks at the empty space, where the creature had been.

Nate hesitates a moment, before: “I did. But only upon exit.” Another pause. “What was it?”

Adam closes his eyes and inhales as deeply as he can, feeling the breath in his nose, crystalline; the catch in his lungs, the stretch of rib.

“I do not know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first time I travelled somewhere that reached temperatures of -28C, -34C, I managed to get icicles on my eyelashes.
> 
> Mmm, debating whether one or two more chapters; expect the chapter count to change!
> 
> Also, Adam and Nate through the centuries (just, A and N)!!!!
> 
> I've been really excited about posting this chapter, can't lie. It will totally get washed away by the Feb love bomb but that's okay :)
> 
> Coming up: Adam goes to Wayhaven.


End file.
